Please take into account that most street lights are not high CRI. Neither are cheap light bulbs that many folks use at home.
Moreover, an image can be “wrong” from a colour rendition point of view and still work because of its story or emotions…
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I am very aware of that. Especially nowadays with all the different bulbs in use and LEDs becoming more prevalent.
This is how I feel: When people say they like my photo, I smile. When people say otherwise, I learn something.
Anything I post, wrote, say, think, or hint at is fair game for anyone to be a critical as they wish, for whatever reason. Over the years, criticism has been the path for me to improve, more so than any other.
Having said that, if you check out my “.dop” file, you’ll see how little I changed in the image. The Leica M10 has its own way of creating photos, quite different than my Nikon DSLR usually, and I have been leaving the white balance setting at 5600K, as I usually do. (I’m guessing the building color is strange in my photo, because of the colored lighting coming from the fire truck.)
Which leave me puzzled with this question - under these conditions, should the building appear “correct”, or should it be “tinted” from all the colored lights on the fire truck and other sources?
I should have taken a photo with my D780 too, just for comparison.
But this leaves things at the same point - should I have left my image at the obviously inaccurate colors in my photo, or corrected the colors to what they really are, as @Joanna did? Something to think about.
Please elaborate on what you were saying, and why.
For me personally that image has been taken in artificial light and expresses so. Whether I would change that to black-and-white is a job for experimenting. Thankfully digital photography makes it easier to experiment than using colour film printing. That could be hard work sometimes.
Setting the white balance on a neutral colour when much of the scene was lit by strong red lights… seems… wrong.
White balance is adjusting the image to attempt to replicate what the brain would have perceived at the time. I think my brain would have seen those white stripes as white stripes lit by red lights, and therefore tinged heavily red.
I always have a hard time setting white balance on night photos because there is no natural light and often what light there is is heavily tinted and would not, therefore, appear simply “white” at the time. Like Mike, I tend to replicate what “feels right” for a given image.
There is also the fact that the brain, at the time, would not take in the entire scene at once. You may well need to set different white balances on the fire engine, the building, and the entranceway.
I would like to leave my cameras with settings that are most likely to work when I first pick up the camera and capture an image. Most likely because of discussions here, I decided to leave my cameras set to 5600K white balance, and that I could always modify that as needed. Lately I just use the white balance slider in PhotoLab until the photo “looks” right - or ignore it.
My eyes are very good at this, or very bad at it, depending on many factors. When I first glance at an image, I usually “feel” that it is right, or off, and with the white balance control I can fix it. Since I’ve been leaving my camera set to 5600 as a default setting, anything not taken in daylight likely needs correction.
So, my question to ask here in this forum, using the above image as a reference point, why shouldn’t I leave my camera white balance set to “auto”? I can still change the white balance during processing. Wouldn’t my images “probably” be closer to being correct, than if I leave the camera set to 5600 permanently? (Most of my images are taken outdoors in natural light, but obviously not all.)
Can I ask each and every one of you what (if anything) you do about your white balance setting?
I leave mine in auto, too. I know it’s correctable “in post” if needed and, as you say, it’s likely to get it right, or close, a significant amount of the time.
If one were to simply set a single white balance and leave it there forever, then it will be right only when the light happens to match your setting. Letting the camera decide, it will get it wrong sometimes, even spectacularly so on some occasions, but get it right or close a lot of the time, as the camera manufacturers spend time on making this function!
So I think auto is far superior to setting a single value, but possibly inferior to manually setting a value in each shooting situation. But… that requires knowledge and experience I do not have.
As I mentioned way back, I leave my WB a 5600°K most of the time, so I can then get some idea of what the light looked like compared to daylight, in case I forget.
Of course, it is only recorded as a suggestion, but it works for me.
Good arguments. My rendering was just a suggestion, but I must admit, the windows do look a weird colour. Like you, I think you could end up changing selected parts - or just leaving it how you felt it looked to you. There are no rules.
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One of those subjects where the whole railway car was impossible without a lot of surrounding junk, so I concentrated on a few detail shots…
Typical for me - I copied you and have been doing it for a very long time, and the best I can remember for why I copied you, is you gave me that this would likely show how the object or scene would look in daylight, and knowing that would help me. Before then, I used to set the camera white balance to “auto”.
I changed it back to “auto” a few hours ago - may leave it there, or may turn it back to 5600K. Doing it your way gives me a known starting point. Using “auto” means the camera is creating the image, not me.
I do find myself changing the white balance in PhotoLab quite often, so the final white balance has been up to me… so maybe it makes no difference how I set it in the camera.
A RAW image from your camera doesn’t have a fixed WB. That only applies to JPEG images.
So, what you see on the back of your camera is the JPEG preview, complete with whatever colour temperature you have set. That temperature is “attached” to a RAW file but, as you have found out, can be changed at will.
Don’t forget that autoWB can be influenced by all sorts of weird stuff like mixed temperature lighting (tungsten, LED, halogen, etc). What gets chosen is down to where the sensor happens to be pointing and, since that is usually not at a light source, convinced me to settle on 5600°K so I had a known starting point in PL.
Auto, always, that’s on a Leica CL APS-C. It does a really good job, I rarely need to change much in post.
Hmm, Leica CL. Never seen one. I did some searching, and found this:
Fascinating. The more I think about this, the more I think I should change my setting back to Auto. Since I’m only shooting in raw, and doing all my editing in PhotoLab, I wonder if it will make any difference.
That’s an amazing little camera - that it works with M-mount lenses makes it even more appealing. I’m curious, does PhotoLab support it, or do you have to do tricks like what I do with my M8.2 ?
No difference at all to the RAW image, only to any JPEGs. If 5600°K has been working before, why bother changing from that?
Well, according to the compatibility charts, the body is supported but only with a limited range of Leica lenses.
But why would you want to move to an APS-C sensor, which is only ⅔ the size of your other cameras?
Anyway, I thought you were going to move more to your Nikon?
This is similar to what you wrote years ago, when I decided to leave my cameras set to 5600°K. Since I’m only shooting raw, and hardly ever set my camera to jpg, to me it’s like removing any white balance setting from my images, so all images have a common starting point.
One other concern - if I show the recently captured image to other people around me, on the camera screen, it’s likely that leaving the setting on ‘auto’ will make those images look more realistic. I got bit by that problem yesterday - went to my doctor’s office, the staff asked for a photo, which I took, and when I showed them the preview, it was all “yellowish” due to the lighting. That’s a reasonable reason for me to just leave it on ‘auto’ and ignore it. More things to think about… When I edit in PhotoLab, I often make a small change in the White Balance setting until the image looks best to me. But there are times, like my photo of the fire truck yesterday, where the “wrong” setting looked better to me than after you corrected it to the “right” setting. It exaggerated the red color, which I enjoyed.
One last thing - the majority of my photos are taken in bright sunlight, so it probably doesn’t matter what setting I use for white balance, either 5600 or ‘auto’. What would matter is if I set it to some goofy setting, then forgot about it, and left it there - meaning my images on the back of the camera might be horrible when I showed an image on the rear screen to other people. I think I should flip a coin, ‘auto’ or ‘5600’. 
Hi @mikemyers, yes that’s the one. Released in 2018 though unfortunately discontinued earlier this year. That’s another story but I guess it didn’t do as well as they hoped or they decided APS-C wasn’t a road they wanted to stay on. It’s L-Mount but is designed to take M-lenses via an adapter, the camera itself is supported in PL though I doubt the camera/ M-Lens combo is but I don’t have any to try. I do have autofocus TL lenses which it’s designed for natively, in combination with them PL has module support for the whole range with the exception of one of the primes (35mm Summilux TL 1.4). Sigma also produce some L-mount lenses for APS-C but, again, I don’t have any.
It’s a cracking bit of kit and cost a little bit less than my car, as opposed to an M or SL2 which are both about the same as my house.
I think I found the reason:
https://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/latest/photo-news/leica-discontinues-cl-tl2-cameras-to-focus-on-full-frame-166394
It looks to me like a fantastic travel camera, and there is a nice on on sale right now from KEH, but I’m trying very hard to simplify my camera “collection”. I especially want to start using my film cameras again. Leica still plans to support your camera for another six years, which is great. Heck, they’re still going to do a no charge repair on my M8.2 body which is from 2008. Leica seems to do a very good job of supporting their old cameras as much as possible. As to APS-C, you can get the same images as you expected, but you just need to use a different focal length lens. That’s how I deal with my M8.
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After you wrote that, I reset the white balance on my M10 back to 5600, and shortly afterwards went to bed. I woke up around midnight for no obvious reason, glanced out my window, and saw a beautiful view of Biscayne Bay, with a thick cloud cover reflecting light to light up the scene. I took the M10, and took a series of photos. This one came out the best. But the color looked “wrong” at 5600. With PhotoLab I tried to make it look natural, and settled on 4716, much cooler than where I left it.
I’m pleasantly surprised the photo came out this nice. It was on a tripod, so no excuses. ISO was set to 800, which I figured was low enough. This was with my 28mm Voigtlander, which is quite sharp - I thought about using my 50, but I liked seeing more of the view. It’s the full image, no cropping, no straightening.
I’m sure @Joanna will do things I hadn’t thought of. The only correction I made was to use control points to tone down the brightness of one of the buildings towards the left, where cruise ships dock. If I had been thinking more clearly, I’d probably have shot just the city part in the middle, using my 90mm lens. I thought of playing with the clouds, to bring out the detail more - but didn’t. I left them the way they looked to me.
I had planned to stop taking so many photos of Biscayne Bay, but this one I couldn’t resist.
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L1004597 | 2022-11-04.dng.dop (16.4 KB)
